Jan Nowicki
The lives of urbanites intertwine in a world where anything can happen at any time.
As Poland is placed under martial law in 1981, two confidence tricksters try to evade both the police and the army. They become embroiled in a web of schemes engineered by the secret service, fellow criminals and the democratic resistance.
The film is about a group of old retired theatre actors in a retirement home for actors who aim to regroup and stage Goethe's Faust.
One of the doyennes of Hungarian film deals with a dark period of national history: the Soviet regime in Hungary. She portrays it through the fate of the former prime minister and national hero, Imre Nagy. The script is based on the diary written by Imre Nagy, and the memories of his daughter, Erzsébet Nagy, as well as authentic documents and records.
Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.
The movie is inspired by writer-director Márta Mészáros' own childhood. The film is a grim reminder of horrible days under Stalinist period when several innocent people were persecuted for no fault.A good film which allow people to know how people in Europe were tortured before second world war by dictators and authoritarian regimes.
A story of a mother who had to change her profession from a teacher to a high class prostitute to make a living.
The story is narrated by ten-year old Staszek, who writes in his diary about his school-friend Jozef. Jozef comes from a family of blacksmiths, all of whom bear the name Jozef. Since he is the sixth consecutive son to be called Jozef, he is nicknamed Szustek (meaning "sixth one").
In this Polish-German fantasy thriller, Wroclaw lawyer Anna Bracka (Antonina Choroszy) is after top-level corruption when her lover Jerzy (Artur Zmijewski) suggests she take a bribe to lose the case. After her angry refusal, he rapes her, and she drives away into the rain, nearly hitting amnesiac Witek (Mariusz Bonaszewski) wandering in the road. She takes him to an abandoned housing project, and when his memory returns, he tells her his gun was once owned by retired military prosecutor Jan Szymanski (Jan Nowicki), Anna's father. Anna goes to her father, who remembers prosecuting and then befriending Witek during the 1949 communist takeover of Poland. Flashbacks link the idealistic young Witek, who refused to sign a false statement and betray his beliefs, to the equally idealistic Anna
An expressionist biography of Edith Stein, who converted from the Jewish faith to the Catholic one and became a Carmelite sister. She would die in a German concentration camp.
This drama follows the dilemma of a young, unwillingly pregnant wife who gives her child up for adoption by a businesswoman. Anna doesn't need another mouth to feed. She can barely afford to care for the two she already has so when she discovers that she is six weeks pregnant she readily accepts the cash offer from Terez, her tough boss at the store where she works. If she will isolate herself throughout the pregnancy, secretly bear the child and immediately allow Terez to sign for it, Anna will receive $50,000. Most of the story then focuses upon Anna's emotional processes as she evaluates her choice. Included are dream segments and shots an unborn baby in the womb.
Hungary, end of World War II. Five Hungarian soldiers desert their troop which has been directed to Germany. They are escaping with the help of a stamp and unfilled travelling warrants, trying to survive until the war ends.
This story follows a young student, who is orphaned as she grows to adulthood in the shadow of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Coming from the Communist intelligentsia, she sees her friends and family react differently. Her lover, a married factory manager, supports the patriots and later assists fellow workers in staging a strike. Meanwhile her sister and others express anger at being forced from their homes during the revolution and continue to express a hatred for the rebels afterwards. But in the end they realize that for all people, real life is not possible after the revolt and its brutal suppression by the Soviets and their collaborators.
Fanny lives in the forest with her meteorologist mother. One day on her way across the forest to visit her grandmother and great grandmother, she has three encounters that will change her life forever: an apparently kind and gentle wolf, a city boy and an ornithologist who bears a striking resemblance to the father who long ago abandoned her and her mother.
Poet-filmmaker Jørgen Leth taps his own earliest inspirational veins by free-floating through a camera/microscope-enhanced set of poems with love as their first and final subject. For example, how a tropical island woman prepares for a meeting with her lover. The film was shot partly in the South Pacific with more than a nod to social anthropoliogist B. Malinowski's historical work The Sexual Life of Savages.
Based on Michał Choromański's novel. Young artist arrives at Zakopane and meets local people.
The law student Caroline and the assistant professor Tom are husband and wife, but they keep their marriage a secret. While Caroline is afraid of annoying her mother Hella who ever since her divorce twenty years ago distrusts men in general, Tom dreads the criticism of his professor, a family law specialist who objects to the concept of marriage. By chance, Caroline gets hold of some juicy information: Her mother and the professor used to be a couple and she is their child. With almost missionary zeal she addresses herself to the task of convincing the two grown-ups to get back together. In the process, however, she steers both her academic studies and her own marriage into a crisis.
A continuation of "Diary for My Children," the film picks up in 1950, when Juli, the diarist, is 18 and determined to become a movie director.
This Polish historical drama film traces the fascinating saga of a wealthy, princely Polish dynasty in years 1900-1935.
In the 21st century, prisoners aboard penitentiary space ships explore unknown worlds. Scope, one of the prisoners is sent on a planet though to be lifeless, until he found "Humans" on it.
Set in an underground dungeon inhabited by bundled, ragged human beings, after the nuclear holocaust. The story follows the wanderings of a hero through the situations of survival. People wait for the Ark to arrive and rescue them while their habitat falls apart.
A semi-autobiographical story of a young woman's life in Budapest under Stalin.
1894. The mortal remains of Lajos Kossuth are brought home from abroad, the railways are lined with people with their hats in hand, and among them stands the teenager Imre Tányér. 1910. The grown-up Imre undertakes the task to solve the question unsolved since 1848-49, i.e. the transformation of peasant life. He fights for the rights of his class, for justice, for human dignity in a society distorted, backward and built on inequality.
Released from prison after five years, con-artist Szu is sent packing by his young wife; he heads for the town of Lutyn where he runs a con and attracts the interest of Jurek, a young cab driver who imagines himself a great grifter. Szu ("Sharp") teaches Jurek a few tricks enabling the young man to win some money in Wroclaw, then Sharp departs with Jola, a prostitute who offers him a mark. How that plays out, Jurek's determination to win big, Sharp's cold calculations, and the wages of sin await.
In the first half of the fifties Júlia, the weaver meets engineer Szél on a visit with "educative" purpose, who raises his three children alone in a mighty villa. Júlia is willing to take care of the adolescent children and she moves in to the villa. She falls in love with the man but he is not able to express true, deep feelings.
Young Poland period in Kraków before WWI. Young doctor Edward comes back from Paris and meets his friends belonging to artistic bohema.
Set in 1905. The story focuses on a young and inexperienced man in a revolutionary execution squad. He does his killing job out of idealism, and for the love of a woman. The young student murders a Russian spy and is afterwards arrested by the police. Much to his surprise he is released after a session with the traitor-judge, hinting at some leaks in the organisation. Student reports his suspicions back to the organisation, but in response is given a new hit mission.
The film is set in a terrorizing world of the future, where technology commands the movements of individuals, supervised by the doctors, carrying out a program to improve the human race. Thus, instead of doctors creating a monster, the monsters are already there as the species of the future - but one of them is suspected by the doctors of being a human being. That is Golem in reverse.
Sylvia cannot have children, and she convinces married Jewish woman Irene to have a child and then give the child to her for adoption. The plan works but it also backfires. The way in which the child was adopted causes friction between Sylvia and her husband, and to make matters worse, Sylvia's husband falls in love with Irene. A crisis looms when he asks his jealous wife to give Irene her identity papers because Jews are being deported and Irene will die without their help.
Barbara is a forty-year-old woman of Polish origin living in Budapest. She is a biologist, a wife and a mother. The death of her woman friend opens her eyes to the fact that she is lonely, unable to find her place.
Set before the first World War in part of Poland under Austrian occupation, the story of a young boy in primary school who later grows up to become a rebellious, poetic-minded teen in the same school when the national movement toward liberation is under way. The story of a country where church and state work together to suppress the human spirit.
The film tells the story of two women, one runs a boardinghouse for girls and the other is a young married woman who is fleeing her passionate marriage with an uncontrollable alcoholic. After their meeting their relationship grows into a friendship and each of them has to evaluate their life and relationships with others.
In what appears to be an inexplicable incident, a man drives up to a resort hotel in midwinter, throws away his car keys, enters, and proceeds to agitate everyone he meets with his urgency -- a message he is somehow unable to communicate. Then he leaves, disappearing in the snow. Later, the people he appeared to have upset have gathered to search for him and find him frostbitten, but alive. Visiting him at the sanatorium to which he has been taken, they gradually discover what was really happening.
Village-girl (Juli Kovács) arrives in the city to work in a factory. The works manager (János Bodnár) sets his eye on her, but at first the girl refuses his advance.
Nights and Days is a family saga of Barbara Ostrzenska-Niechcic, (played by Jadwiga Baranska) and Bogumil Niechcic, (played by Jerzy Binczycki) against the backdrop of the January Uprising of 1863 and World War I. The film is a rather straightforward and faithful adaptation of a novel by Maria Dabrowska with the same title. The plot is woven around the changing fortunes of a noble (upper-class) Niechcic family in the pre-WWI Poland. There are two main crossing threads: a social history one and an existential one. The cinematographic version is a condensation of the 12 part award winning TV serial of the same title and using the same cast and producers.
A young man named Josef visits a dilapidated Sanatorium to see his father Jakob. On his arrival, a sinister doctor informs him that his father had stopped breathing but hasn't died yet, perhaps due to Josef's arrival which may have halted time in the sanatorium. Josef undertakes a strange journey through the many rooms of the sanatorium, each which conjures worlds composed of his memories, dreams and nightmares
Poetically shown story of love, passion, loyalty, betrayal of trust, and death.
Set during the Nazi occupation of Poland, in which Michal witnesses the murder of his mother, wife and child. He is hurled into a life that literally is not his own; a surreal world littered with trapdoors, doppelgängers and wormholes. It also tells the true untold story of a Nazi vaccine laboratory where Jews and members of the resistance were “employed” as feeders for parasites infected with typhus.
This intense chamber drama centers on an ambitious young industrial designer who is summoned home to help his father and sister. Both the aristocratic family he fled in shame and scorn, and their dilapidated country estate, bathed in an oppressively nostalgic light, prove ultimately inescapable.
An ambitious, enthusiastic young geologist is entangled in bureaucratic red tape when he tries to drill for oil. Frustrated with the situation, he torches an abandoned mill, ignores his girlfriend, and fights with his friends who do not share his exuberance about the project. The feature premiered at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival
In 1668 Polish colonel Michael Wolodyjowski, who recently retired to a monastery, is recalled to active duty and takes charge of Poland's eastern frontier defenses against invading Tatar hordes and Ottoman armies.
